The Ashes on Our Foreheads: The Right to Protest Is the First Right of a Patriot
Lahore, 1929. Image courtesy of British Pathé.
There is a photograph that should hang in every classroom in this country: the funeral procession of Jatindra Nath Dashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatindra_Nath_Das , 1929, winding through the streets of Calcutta. Six hundred thousand people walking behind the body of a twenty-four-year-old who had starved himself for sixty-three days in Lahore Central Jail. He was not demanding independence that day; he was demanding that an Indian prisoner be fed and treated like a European one. He died for the dignity of the jailed, and a nation that was not yet born carried him on its shoulders. Let me say that again: sixty-three days! That is two months of hunger strike and, of course, the beatings, the jail, the pain, the suffering.